Conn laughed theatrically.
The dude really has a gift for this, Ryan thought. I’ll give him that.
“Lies! All lies! A pile of jack to whoever brings the murderers to me. Alive! We all know how to take care of the likes of these stoneheart taints, don’t we, boys and girls!”
With at least fifty sec goons converging on the companions, there wasn’t anybody left to make sure the
crowd responded on cue. Only a couple of gleeful shouts were raised in response.
Frank cupped his hands around his mouth. “Please listen to them, Mathus! They tell the truth! It was the coamers all along, and they are after us! All of them!”
“You, too, Frank?” Conn asked. He sounded sad, but he didn’t lower his volume any. “My friends, an additional award to whoever brings Mr. Ramakrishnan to me. The traitor’s head will suffice.”
Ryan raised his handblaster and fired a shot in the air. Even among the rising tumult of the crowd, the shot rang clear through the night. Instant stillness ensued.
The sec teams closing in on them seemed to really notice the imposing array of blasters being pointed outward by their intended victims. They froze.
“Don’t be stupe, Conn,” Ryan declared. “You traded with us often enough. You know we deal straight. I don’t know what you’ve been telling these folks, but the truth is, the coamers are real. They took us captive, and we busted out. And now they’re on their way right here with bloodlust and fire in their bastard white bellies!”
He wondered what had happened to Wymie, the black-haired girl who’d lost her sister and blamed them. Briefly. Ryan knew firsthand how the game of power was played full-contact. He had the eye patch and the scar down his face to show for it. Conn clearly not only knew how to play the game, but how to win it. But Conn’s run was about to come to an abrupt end. Ryan heard more screaming from the path they’d just walked to get here.
“Time’s up, Conn,” he said, shouting this time, because it was true. “Forget about fighting us and join with us.”
Conn laughed showily again. “Forget about fightin’ you?” he said cockily. “Or you’ll what? We hugely outnumber you.”
“Not us,” Ryan answered. “Them.”
The night exploded with screaming white bodies.
“I’d suggest you run, Frank,” Ryan said. “Fast as you can.”
“Where?”
“Away!” Mildred shouted. Her hands were trembling where they gripped her ZKR in isosceles combat-shooting stance. She kept a cool head under fire—they all did—but this situation was beyond extraordinary.
“West,” J.B. said.
With a spastic nod of thanks, Frank took off in that direction as fast as his long, thin legs could carry him. Nobody paid attention to him, not even the sec force who had largely ringed in the little group.
The coamers had not appeared all around the army, but they were attacking in a white wave from at least a full quarter of the perimeter, all from the east.
They were too enraged—and not bright at the best of times—to think tactically enough to spread out underground far enough west that they could surround the camp when they broke out into the night air. But they had sure started swarming out of other bolt-holes than the passage Ryan’s crew had unsealed at the bottom of the caved-in site.
Blasters were booming all around. No shots headed the companions’ way. The rank and file had no trouble believing Ryan’s warning. At least not when the coamers
were leaping on top of their friends and neighbors and crunching off their faces right before their eyes. “Git your worthless asses up on stage in front of Mr. Conn,” Potar bellowed to his sec team like an angered bull. “Or I’ll make you wish we’d hung you on a cross for the cannies!”
This time Ryan had a clear shot at the commander of the enemy throng, but Ryan had no time to unslung his Steyr, much less take aim across a hundred yards or more, because he and his companions were abruptly fighting for their lives.
He heard two shots erupt from Krysty’s Glock 18. It took skill to fire in such a controlled way, given the weapon’s high cyclic rate. He looked to see a sec woman falling backward with her hands coming up. Her double-barrel shotgun spewed its titanic smoky flame toward the handful of stars visible above the bonfire, torch and lantern light in the trampled-flat clearing.
Whether driven by lust for Conn’s promised reward or simply fixated on the prey at hand, some members of the sec team attacked. Even as a double boom rang out, Krysty ripped off another two rounds, then a 3-round burst, crumpling the sec woman’s male companions.
Drawing his panga, Ryan charged at a another knot of sec men, half a dozen strong, west, the way they’d sent their erstwhile captive. The screams, getting closer, showed the infuriated coamer horde was overrunning the army camp with shocking speed.
Ryan double-tapped the sec man who raised a single-shot longblaster at him from twenty feet and closing. He took another one down with a left-handed transverse slash across the face with his panga, which left a spurting, bone-crunched ruin in its wake. The man dropped
keening to his knees, clutching his smashed-in features with both hands. Blood squeezed between the fingers.
Another sec man caught hold of Ryan’s right arm. The one-eyed man jammed the muzzle of his SIG into his adversary’s paunch and fired once. The man dropped with his cotton shirt smoking, howling in pain from being gut shot.
Something hard and heavy clipped Ryan at the curve of his skull, above and behind his left ear. He stumbled, then went to his hands and knees. Stars went nova in his brain, red and white and actinic blue, and his stomach suddenly sloshed with nausea. He would have puked up everything he had eaten that day—if he had eaten that day; their rations had at last run out.
Some combination of trouble-honed senses brought Ryan’s head left. That made it feel as if his brain had come loose and was spinning inside his cranium. He found himself looking up the bore of a black-powder longblaster. It looked as big around as that cave they’d dropped on the giant worm. Fuzzily beyond it he saw a demonically twisted face leering at him triumphantly over its cap-lock firing mechanism.
“Say good-night, Gracie,” the sec man said.
Something thunked hard at the juncture of his neck and his right shoulder. A black liquid sheet shot suddenly up to hide that side of his face. Ryan’s still-scrambled wits recognized arterial spray, even as they sent him half diving, half falling flat on the ground.
Launched by the dying sec man’s reflex clench on the trigger, the black-powder blaster’s dragon breath felt nearly as hot as it blowtorched near his backside as the live lava had been.
Krysty looked down at him as she yanked the sharpened
blade of her Swiss e-tool out of the neck of the toppling man. She had holstered her handblaster, and stuck out her freed-up left hand to Ryan.
“Shake it off, lover,” she said, keeping her humor even as literal hell broke loose around her, complete with flesh-eating, white-skinned devils. “You’re holding up the parade.”
Thankfully, he held out his knife hand. She caught his wrist and pulled him to his feet as if he weighed no more than a child. Even without the help of her guiding spirit, Gaia, the redhead was strong.
He swayed. The universe was still rotating rapidly around him, but at least his brain had decided to settle back into place.
The other sec men weren’t idle, but neither were Ryan’s companions. In an instant he saw Doc backhand one man across the face with his LeMat, sending him sprawling. A bushy-bearded sec man twice Jak’s size grabbed him by his collar and started to spin him. Then he instantly yanked his hands away, screaming shrilly at the pain in his fingers and palms, which had been slashed by the razors Jak had sewn there to discourage just such familiarity. The albino had long since emptied his blaster and tucked it away, happy to be able to fight with some of his beloved knives. He drove the brass-knuckle hand guard of his World War I–style trench knife into the screaming bearded mouth in a rattler-quick overhand right.
To Ryan’s left, Ricky doubled over another sec man with a piston drive of his fat longblaster barrel to his opponent’s solar plexus, then brought the steel-plated butt down hard on the man’s exposed nape to shatter his spine.
Ryan recovered enough to shoot a man ten feet ahead
who showed signs of aiming a handblaster. It was a sloppy shot, one-handed, without even a sight picture. Trader would have chewed his ass for hours for taking a rank-ass, triple-stupe amateur shot like that. But the 9 mm bullet hit somewhere, and he knew he hadn’t hit one of his companions.
The sec man dropped his Peacemaker revolver, clutched his shattered shoulder with his left hand and turned and ran away, shrieking. The shrieks got louder when a hurtling white shape landed on his back. Then it cut off as doglike jaws crunched through the back of his skull. The sec man fell forward, still ridden by the coamer who’d killed him.
“Just run!” Ryan croaked.
The sec men, and whatever regular army members remained nearby, instead of falling back in some order for the tents to the west, or just lighting out for the hills like sensible folk, suddenly forgot all about the rewards on Ryan and his crew. Instead they were finding ways of dealing with the difficult realization that the stalkers of their childhood nightmares—the dread albino ghouls called the coamers—were absolutely real. And that “dealing with” consisted either of fighting furiously with blaster, farm implement, big rock, boots and bare fists, or dying noisily—and not infrequently both.
J.B.’s Uzi ripped out an unusually long burst. The Armorer wasn’t concerned about overheating his weapon, clearly. You had to live longer than seemed likely for that to matter much. Men and women in the path of his copper-jacketed slugs screamed and fled, screamed and fell, screamed and limped or tried to crawl away. Ryan didn’t know whether any of them were sec men, or had
even been offering resistance. They were in the way. The Armorer was sweeping them out of it. Nothing personal.
As Ryan vaulted a writhing woman with a cloud of pale frizzy hair, he saw a cannie leap at Mildred from the right, claws and jaws spread wide. She shot him through the upper jaw. The bullet punched through the roof of his mouth, out the top of his snout and rammed into his skull right between the blood-hued eyes. The right one popped from its socket.
A weight landed on Ryan’s back, or rather, his pack—they were all carrying their gear. They didn’t plan to stick around the Pennyrile any longer, one way or another.
He heard frustrated subhuman snarling, felt hot breath on the left side of his face, smelled the knee-loosening stench of rotting human flesh. He felt the creature wiggle on his back, trying to bring its canine jaws within biting range of Ryan’s flesh.
Ryan stuck his P226 back over his shoulder and fired blind. The weight and the stink abruptly left him.
The coamers seemed as though they’d lost their laser focus on the surface-dwellers who had chilled their queen and so many of their inbred kin. They hadn’t gotten over their rage. They now seemed content to take it out on anyone.
For their part the locals were focused on running away. The ones who had held back to stand and fight were presumably all cannie snacks, for now or later. The ones who retained presence of mind, and weren’t just locked in the
flight
part of flight-fight-freeze mode, were making the best speed possible for the defensive phalanx that had formed before the densely packed tents pitched along the northwestern edge of the open campground.
Ryan and company steered a course due west, and a little south, to avoid running into any lines of blasterfire.
At least the cannies behind them had gotten tangled up with locals. Over it all, Ryan realized Conn was still raving over his megaphone. Insanely, it was against them. “Don’t let the stonehearts get away!” he shrieked. “They’re the ones to blame for all of this! Chill them!”
A quick glance showed that no one paid attention to him. Not even the score or so sec men standing shoulder to shoulder in front of the dais, blasters leveled straight ahead, who looked glumly determined to chill anyone or anything who got close to their master. Apparently they were still, after all of this, more afraid of their monstrous sec boss than an endless swarm of raging cannies.
Suddenly the still mostly human stream of running figures parted ahead of Ryan and his friends, to flow around a single gigantic figure standing as immovable as Mother McComb’s throne rock.
“Not so fast, you cannie-lovers!” the sec boss boomed. “I’ve got you now!”
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “Can’t you give it up?”
“You and me, One-Eye!” the giant bellowed, beating his chest with fists that looked as large as Ryan’s head. “One-on-one.
Mana y mana
. Like men.”
“It’s
mano a mano
, dickhead,” Ryan said. He raised the SIG and fired twice.
With breathtaking speed Potar snatched the two random figures running closest to him. One was a coamer female, and the other was a beanpole man about Ryan’s own height. As if they were dolls, the sec boss clapped them together in front of his bulk to take the bullets instead of him.
“Blasters are for pussies!” he said, with a gust of laughter. “Bare hands, or I’ll crush you with these losers.”
“Fuck that.”
Ryan was carrying his Steyr slung muzzle-down for rapid access, the way he usually did when they were headed into known danger. Stuffing his SIG back in its holster beneath his left armpit, he reached back, grabbed the longblaster by its fore-end, whipped it up past his own waist, then let it go. Reaching back, his hand found the rear grip with practiced ease. He fired from the hip.
Against black-powder blasters, even double-potent ones, Potar would have been safe as houses behind his human shields, one limp, one still writhing with some vigor. And Ryan was not inclined to rely even on the renowned penetration of his 9 mm ball handblaster bullets.
But a sharp-nosed, 147-grain, M80, full-metal-jacket round, traveling at upwards of 2700 feet per second, blasted right through the torso of the motionless full-human beanpole without appreciably slowing down.